Why FEMA turned away help

[housewolf]

Report from a Houston relief worker, from a diary posted at DailyKos


<snip>

Bill is a member of a volunteer firefighter team in the Houston area. He and his team have a lot of experience helping after hurricanes. And they also have special expertise -- a lot of them work for a living on oil infrastructure and repairs. Bill is a professional logistics expert whose assignments have included getting a client's tsunami-flattened distribution facility back operating within a couple of weeks, and pre-invasion logistics work in Kuwait.

On Monday night, his group assembled their rescue equipment and tools, and packed them into their boats along with all the emergency supplies they could carry. By Tuesday morning, they were almost to New Orleans. "We were stopped at gunpoint by FEMA and told to turn back," he told me. When I asked, he clarified that they did not point the guns at them, but they were carrying and displaying their weapons.

FEMA told him that no one was allowed to enter the city to help "until it was secured by the National Guard." The Houston team asked if they could wait. The FEMA staff told them yes, but that they shouldn't expect anything to change.

So they set up camp in the parking area where they had been stopped, and they waited. By Thursday night, when they were still waiting in the same place, some of the team returned to Houston. The rest decided to wait longer. And still nothing changed, so the remaining team members returned to Houston on Saturday night.

Needless to say, Bill is livid about this. I asked him why they had not been sent to some of the other communities in the hurricane-stricken area where security was not as much of an issue.

"We asked," he told me, "but they said that our expertise was more needed in the New Orleans area." The fucking catch-22 -- they were needed in New Orleans, so they weren't allowed to go elsewhere, but they weren't allowed to go into New Orleans, so the upshot was that they did nothing except sit and wait, and then go home in frustration.

<snip>

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/9/5/105538/7048

[Warren Stupidity]

1. MIWOP.

Paging Will Pitt: changed your mind yet?

[Coastie for Truth]

2. Not surprising

The NGO volunteers (including Red Cross, Ham Radio, Salvation Army) weren't allowed in either.

[OneBlueSky]

3. State of the Art Mobile Hospital from UNC Also Turned Away . . .

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/9/5/171122/0018

[Porcupine]

4. Another link in the Genocide chain.

People would have had to literally fight their way into New Orleans to help. The people they would have had to fight were under the direction of the Bush administration.